I'm pretty tired of the sniping and punditry about the recent release of Rakudo Star. However, David Golden has put together a great article about what the Rakudo Star release means both to the team and to the public.
Key points from his article:
- Rakudo Star is the first prototype of an end-user distribution tarball
- There is no way reactions to Rakudo Star can possibly live up to the hopes and dreams of those involved the project (and I say that it can't live up to the expectations of those outside the project, either)
- Rakudo Star still is a significant step forward for Perl 6
- If anyone was waiting for Perl 6 to rescue Perl, then they'll need to keep waiting.
And then, down in the comments, Moritz Lenz points out something I'd overlooked:
Yes, people now say "Rakudo is slow as $funny_metaphor", but that's much better than "Rakudo is vapourware". Once we speed up Rakudo, we can simply post benchmarks and say "look, it's now $n times faster than before". "Rakudo is slow" implies "Rakudo is", and that's a big step forward.
Thanks for the reminder, Moritz. Next it will be "Rakudo is faster, but not fast enough." And then maybe "Rakudo doesn't have enough documentation," and then "Rakudo doesn't have all the modules it should." All of it is progress.
One they get to "I just don't like Rakudo as much as PHP" then you know that everything's perfect.
We have a new motto: Rakudo Is
And the last step:
"Python|Ruby|PHP|Java|C# is better"
But if there is a flamewar on the subject of which language is better. Then it means the language is seen as a "danger".
"Rakudo doesn't have all the modules it should" # this is to me the only one that really matters, because its the final frontier for being "Usable".
I did blog on that subject somewhat, but there's a lot of TL;DR.
What the gist of it is, is people who are able, should be writing Perl6 modules now, because we can, without needing everything else done first.
That way, when the speed is up to scratch, it will prove much more competitive in a much shorter time frame.